


Palimpsest

by hellkitty



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:08:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for devohoneybee  </p><p>Post-canon, so spoilers for the entire series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palimpsest

It was like coming down off the worst high he’d ever been on: that sick, dizzy feeling that a moment ago was almost like euphoria; that moment when your sweat hit the point of clammy chill.  And all he could think about, for a moment, was how much his throat hurt, raw from screaming, tight from some emotion he didn’t even know how to name.  All Jesse knew is that he was driving, moving away from the compound with an animal’s blind instinct, the adrenaline flight beginning to desert him now, leaving him a lone capsule of life in the thick of night.

Ground Control to Major Tom….

Nothing felt like night in the desert: he’d learned that as a kid, camping with his parents, and he’d learned it again, with Mr White and the RV, how the desert, which seemed a baking bowl in the heat of the day, would fill with shadows, a kind of tangible barrenness.  He’d never felt more alone than then, sitting on the RV’s roof, his cig’s burning end just a tiny, dull star under the heavy lid of the night sky, till now, hurtling through the darkness, the bald white of his sneaker sole jammed against the accelerator.

He could hear sounds, but at first he’d thought it was just some echo of the scream he’d given, busting the car through the compound’s gate, trapped in the car’s small space. But he could hear it was sirens now, Doppler-warped and weird, enough to make his heart stutter, like a car jerking its way on fumes. He couldn’t see the lights, just the sounds like some ululation of some wild thing splitting the night, an animal keen that seemed torn out of his own head.

He didn’t want to run into cops right now. Didn’t want to run into anything. He just wanted to...run, get away from all of it, and keep moving so he didn’t have to think, blind motion, sensory surface: seeing and hearing and smelling the cheap cracking vinyl of the car’s dash, the baked smell only a New Mexico car gets after months of scorching on the heat-caked sand.

And that worked, until the ribbon of macadam came to a T and he had to decide. Or really, it wasn’t much of a decision, just the conscious acknowledgment that he was going somewhere.

Going home, if there was even a home to go back to. 

The tires gritted on the sand blown over the road as he turned, heading toward the where the city would spread itself, a place of streetlights and neon at this time of night, everything closed up tight except a few 7-11s and the 24 hour diner on the edge of town. 

_“Yeah, man, I’m telling you,” Skinny Pete said, squinting at the syrup bottle. “I heard Joss Whedon crossed the Illuminati or some shit.”_

_“WHOA!” Badger’s mouth hung open. “So that’s why Firefly got canceled!”_

_Skinny Pete nodded with an air of conspiratorial wisdom, turning another bottle around till he found the blueberry syrup, pouring it over his Grand Slam stack with a flourish. “Fox, yo. Everyone knows they’re, you know, controlled and shit.”_

_“I liked the hot chick,” Combo said, looking up from shoveling pancake in his mouth._

_“Which one, man. They were all hot.”_

_“You know, the hooker chick. The classy hooker. Intifada or something.”_

_“Inara,” Jesse said, fingers toying with his lighter. “The queen of my wet dreams, yo.”_

He felt a shudder passing the garish Denny’s sign. It felt like someone else’s life. It felt like he was walking on his own grave.

“Fuck,” Jesse said, turning the heat on in the car.  Fuck it that it was September in goddam New Mexico: the adrenaline fall--or something--was making him shiver. 

The heat didn’t help. He could feel it on his skin, but it was like it didn’t make it through under the surface, as though the core of him was still brittle and frozen, like something dipped in liquid Nitrogen.

It was cold, but maybe that was okay, because it was numb, a lack of feeling, an inability to feel, settling in his chest, like a river rock, as he rolled the battered car to a stop outside the house. His house. His parents’ house.  Another flood of memories, another twitch like they were someone else’s life, and this was the highlight reel.

Shitty highlights.

_“So,” she was saying, some girl whose name he should probably remember, but didn’t, because it didn’t fucking matter, nothing fucking mattered anymore, his life was helpless and out of control and if this was rich, if this was empire building, all he could say he’d learned was that either money didn’t buy happiness, or that he’d burned out the whole happiness shit long ago, snorted it away or shot it up or...something, “you wanna fuck?”  She apparently did, kneeling over him on the bed, peeling off her t-shirt, revealing a red lacy bra, the kind of cheap crap they sold at K-mart for Valentine’s day, with little pink flocking hearts and shit on it, halfway worn away._

_“Nah,” he said, rolling over, onto one side.  He didn’t want to fuck, and that was another nail in the ‘what the fuck is wrong with me?’ box.  Because she was hot, even with the slipped-up bra wires slicing crescents in the undersides of her tits, if you looked past the vacant expression. But it was like he could see right through her. Not to like her skeleton or some shit, but because he knew, just looking at her, she wanted to fuck not to fuck, but because he was the guy who owned the house, bought the drugs, and she wanted to guarantee herself a slice of the party, maybe someone to buy her some lingerie from a place that didn’t end in -mart._

_Yeah, he wasn’t that guy._

It was just like he’d left it, and Jesse didn’t know why that freaked him out.  The grass had faded to a crinkly brown from late summer: under the amber streetlight it looked like it has been spread with some kind of sepia hay.

His parents would die: mom and dad houseproud of their golf-green lawn, the hydrangeas and geraniums, trying to turn the place into Anyplace USA, fighting the fact it was Albuquerque and New Mexico didn’t give a shit and a half about hydrangeas wanting shade. 

But the rest of it looked, well, like he remembered it, last time he’d seen it, before going to Saul, before getting hooked by Mr White’s psycho brother-in-law.  He’d half expected it to be covered in graffiti, turned into a flop. But no, there it was, sitting there in the pale wash of the streetlights and the moonless night, pale as bones. 

Home. Or something. A place that was his, a place he could lock, a place he could control who came in and out.  He wanted it if only for that. If only for tonight.

Shit. 

His keys. They’d taken his keys.  And he hadn’t fought them, because who the fuck needs keys when you’re locked up in sick-fuck-white-power methlab. 

He wasn’t going back there, and shit, if they found his keys, the cops, they’d be knocking on his door.  No. Wait. Maybe they couldn’t do that. He’d always worn gloves in the lab, like Mr White had taught him, gloves and masks and all that shit. No evidence, no DNA tracing him to anything. 

Fuck. Don’t think about that now, he told himself, forcing his heart to calm down, pulling the car key from the ignition. This they could trace to him, to that place, but he could get rid of it in the morning. Maybe. 

Mr White would have known what to do.

The thought hurt, like a bullet through his side.  Mr White was always seven steps ahead of everything. He’d know what the police could do and have a bullet-point plan of steps to unfuck everything.  At least till the next catastrophe. 

No. No. You do not miss that asshole. You do not, Jesse.  The day that guy rolled into your life was the day the fucking bottom fell out of it, only you were too dumb and greedy and probably still a little high to notice it. 

Still, he’d give a lot just to have someone take over, now, someone to at least start him sifting through the pieces here.

Come on, Jesse.  Shit. How many times you sneak in and out of your old bedroom, back in the day? Stop sitting here like a goddam pussy, and get out of the car. 

  
He sat for a moment longer, halfheartedly trying to wipe everything he’d touched with the cuff of his shirt. It was probably stupid, but it was something, a reflex of self-preservation, that he wasn’t done fighting yet.

The car door’s hinge squeaked in the night, complaining metal seeming to fill the neighborhood.  He froze, one foot hanging in the air above the pavement, only daring to move his eyes, scanning from side to side, his breath caught in his throat, scanning for a nosy neighbor, a suddenly burning light, a barking dog.

Nothing.  Jesse released his breath with a shaky sigh, like an old car’s emergency brake, easing his weight onto the street, his face twisting into a grimace as he pushed the car door shut, slowly, but that only drew the metal complaint of the rusty hinge into a long whine.

The door wasn’t shut flush, but fuck if he was going to open and slam it again.  He padded over the dead grass: it crunched under his feet, withered and dry, but at least familiar. Grass, real grass, not the dusty patches of crab scrub shit out in the desert. It felt like normalcy. Just...dead.

His body remembered, at least, how he used to do it: boost over the fence, balance on the top rail, and spider crawl up the shingles of the roof. His parents had never caught on to it, so the screen was still only just in position, the little pegs out of the holes, so he slipped it off, lifting up the pane, sliding inside, like he was trying to slide back into those times. 

_His mom’s voice, shrill with that perfect note of middle class respectable disappointment, before he’d even opened the door. Like he did something wrong by just existing or something.  “Jesse.”_

_“Busy,” he said. He wasn’t staying. Just long enough to grab his hoodie, the one the stupid school dress code decided was illegal or some shit, and head out._

_“The school called.  You missed gym.”_

_“Didn’t have my stuff.”  Not by accident.  He swung the heavy hoodie around his shoulders, checking the pockets: cigs, lighter, phone, rolling papers. This stuff mattered. Gym didn’t._

_“I know I washed it. Where is it?”_

_“Fuck if I know.”  Somewhere in the bottom of his closet, probably.  No way he was going to put on stupid school colors and run around a track.  Fucking metaphor for everything school was trying to get you to do: fit in, conform, go nowhere. Just wear your stupid ass out running in circles._

_“Jesse! Watch your language!” She appeared in the frame of his doorway, just as he shoved his phone in his jeans pocket, the phone he’d bought with his own money from selling weed, after his parents had taken the one they’d given him back as some sort of punishment.  Whatever. It had been a shitty Blackberry, anyway._

_“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck,” he said, waving his hands around, like he was sprinkling profanity, pushing past her. “Later.”_

Later.

He shoved it aside, and as he stood by the bed, rumpled but kind of made, like someone had at least tried to tidy--who the fuck, man?--he felt everything just crash on top of him as though the whole house was collapsing, roof, basement, and all its ghosts. Everything that happened from when he was a teenager, from that screaming moment his parents blamed him for Jake’s weed to now, death and terror and money and numbness.  Like Emilio in the bathtub, crashing through, a disaster of all his sins impossible to hide.

***

The shower helped. A bit, and he found himself fascinated by the swirls and eddies of gritty filth on the white tile of the tub.  Weeks of scunge, dirtier than he’d ever been, even when Mr White had yanked him out of that flophouse after Jane died. 

Jane.

The name, the memory, hit him like a blow. Dead. And Mr White could have saved her.  He felt anger start to burn, like the fuse on one of those cartoon bombs, but then he thought about Andrea. He could have saved Andrea, and how could he hate Mr White for something he did, too?

Out, out, damned spot.

Some shit they had to read in high school, or pretend to read: no one gave a shit if you did or didn’t, and his English teacher had been way too in love with the sound of his own voice rolling over those syllables to, like, give a quiz or some shit. But he remembered that line, remembered cracking a joke about trying some oxy-clean and how women should know that laundry shit anyway.

It probably wasn’t any funnier then than it didn’t feel right now.

But he got the idea, now, scrubbing at his hands, his wrists, till the scabs stung, turning the heat up high enough his skin felt scalded and lobster pink and the whole bathroom was thick with steam. It reminded him of the sauna thing at the rehab place, hot and clean.

Clothes don't feel right anymore, and Jesse looked down at the Ed Hardy t-shirt he tugged out of the drawer like he'd never seen it before. Was it even his? He didn’t remember buying it, but there was a lot about the last year he didn’t remember real clearly. Some on purpose.

He dodged the mirror, not ready to look in his own eyes. It was, what, twelve hours ago that he'd killed a man.  His hands shook and he dropped the toothbrush in the sink, hands gripping the edges of the ceramic bowl. His wrists were still chafed, two bruised half moons over his thumbs where the manacles had dug into him as he'd pulled the chain tight around Todd's neck. 

He'd killed a man, and it wasn't like Gale.  He'd wanted to, this time, rage and helplessness and the memory of that little kid, shot in the desert, and everything about Todd just boiling up, seething down his arms like a swarm of killer bees or something, his eyes stinging as he choked the last of the life out of Todd. You are not me, he'd wanted to say. You are not me.  And you deserve this. For Brock’s sake, for Drew’s sake. 

What the fuck am I gonna do? he thought, and caught a glimpse of his eyes, sunk and haunted despite the night's sleep. 

Food.  That’s what you do, right? That’s what normal people do after getting up, and that’s what he was trying to be, like slipping on an old skin, and it didn’t quite fit, but it was that thing where you figure maybe you just need to wear it a while and it won’t feel so strange. 

The smell from the fridge knocked him back when he opened it: soured milk, straight up rancid meat, the alcohol reek of rotten lettuce and a whole bunch of other smells he couldn’t--and didn’t want to--sort out. He covered his nose with a hoodie sleeve, pushing the door shut.  He’d have to clean that out, top to bottom, bleach the fuck out of it. But not right now. Later.

Later.  It was still kind of a trip, half exciting, half scary, and leaving him teetering in a sort of numbness between them both, to have a later, to have a future that wasn’t making meth till one day Jack got sick of him, or was too drunk or whatever and shot him in the head. 

His stomach didn’t care: the body doesn’t care. It wants to live, always, even when you least want it to, so it asserted itself with a rumbling complaint. 

Jesse moved to the front room, the one by the front door, drifting kind of aimlessly, feeling in his pocket for the car keys.  The car: he should ditch the car.

A scrap of paper caught his attention, the kind of notebook paper torn from a spiral notebook, frizzly edges and all, and a scrawl of half-misspelled words in Sharpie marker.  ‘Yo, dawg.  Lockd the playce up for u. Call sumtime.’ and then a cursivey straight-out-of-third-grade ‘Sincerely, Pete’.

It was something he could do, another normal kind of thing.  He had another phone: always have a backup. He’d learned that back living with his folks, living as a dealer. Never have just one number, just one phone, just one anything. 

***

“Yo, man, you should see it!” Skinny Pete nodded toward the diner’s television. “It all blew and shit last night. Helicopters and everything.”

Jesse risked a look, tugging his hood down lower over his face. Just in case, you know, his mugshot was up there. There was only so much he could count on a few weeks of beard to cover, especially with Todd’s car parked outside. He caught the word ‘Heisenberg’ on the chyron, and grunted, turning back to his food.

“So, like, what, man?” Brandon looked up from where he’d been artistically dispensing ketchup on his pile of fries. “You kill him?” Badger winced, and the table jumped, and the flat line of Skinny Pete’s mouth said he was the one who’d kicked Badger under the table. “I-I mean, uh, you know.”

Jesse shook his head. “Nah. I didn’t.”  He could have. He wanted to. He could still feel the grip of the gun in his hand, warm from whoever had dropped it. He could feel the weight of it, solid and heavy as death itself, a judging eye pointed balefully at Mr White, his own hand stiff and hot from killing Todd, proclaiming him a killer, screaming he had just as much a reason to pull the trigger. His pulse had throbbed ‘do it, do it, do it’. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

“H-hey. We were just, you know. We’re your friends, yo. You can tell us whenever. Or not.”  Pete picked at his hands for a moment, before picking up his fork. 

Friends.

Maybe they were. Fuck knows he didn’t have anything to offer them now. No fat stacks of benjamins, no everlasting party, no crystal, nothing.  But they were here, they’d come over as soon as he’d called, their numbers in his memory, buried under a few sedimented layers.  

“Yeah. Just, you know.”

“Yeah,” Badger said. “We get you. So.” He looked over at Pete as if asking permission. “What you going to do now?” 

“I don’t know,” he said, hollowly. Now? Now was as far as Jesse’d thought. Food, breakfast. He’d hoped the next dot to connect would be clear, but he’d caught enough of the news to know Saul was gone, everyone was gone.  Like he was the only survivor.

It didn’t make him feel good: It made him feel burdened by their memories. Mike. Drew. Jane. Andrea. Mr White.

“Well, what do you want?” Pete said, leaning in, his eyes that intensity they got only at NA meetings. 

“Brock.” The word bubbled from his throat, from his unconscious. 

“The little kid?”

He nodded. “His mom. Uh.” He couldn’t say the word. He didn’t even know what word to say? Dead? Killed? Murdered? Paid the price for Jesse’s feeble bid for freedom, for daring to know him? He felt toxic. 

“Yo, man, that’s rough,” Pete said.  “So he’s probably in the system.”

“System? Like the Matrix?” Badger had moved from dicking with the ketchup to laying a few of the fries in a lattice over his burger. 

“No, dumbass. CYFD has him. Foster care.”

“Oh.” Badger looked disappointed, as if the Matrix would be cooler. It would be.  “Probably,” Jesse said, feeling his heart sink into his feet. “Guess that’s not gonna happen. Not exactly foster-dad material.”  He tried to shrug it off like no big deal, but, fuck, it was a big deal. It was the only deal he had right now. Captain Cook, dealer, out of cards.

“Fuck that, yo.” Pete said. “Hey, man, I got connections, dawg.”

“In foster care.”

Pete sat back, snapping his chest forward like he was almost offended, like Jesse had dimed him. “I been through foster care, man. Where you think I grew up, huh?” He jerked his chin. “You’ll see, man. I got this.” 

***

“Told you I got this,” Pete said, tapping on the passenger side window as Jesse rolled the car to a stop outside the playground. A bunch of kids were digging in the dirt, using sun-faded plastic buckets and toy shovels, or sticks. A couple of girls, in greyish-white anklesocks, tossed stones at the hopscotch grid.  And then there was Brock: Jesse’s eyes found him like he was a hunting dog or something. Maybe it was the shirt, big stripes of color, the brown button eyes, the cropped dark hair. 

“I owe you, man,” Jesse said, pushing open the door.  He didn’t know how Pete had done it, but it had something to do with Brock still being in a group home, and Pete’s old caseworker who ‘owed him a solid’. 

“Nah, man,” Pete said. “Don’t owe me shit.” Maybe it was the kid from foster care who was trying to save another. Maybe it was just payment for all the money he’d made slinging meth for Jesse. Maybe, just maybe, it was just...Pete. Who scruched his shoulders down, like he was going to nap, there in the car, signalling Jesse was up, and he’d wait as long as it took. 

Jesse stood up, looking at, finding, Brock over the roof of the car, feeling the sun’s heat radiate from the roof.  “Brock,” he said, and the word came out broken and weak, more like  a croak, until he stepped around the car, onto the pavement. “Yo,” he said, “Brock.”

_“You think this is funny?” his father’s voice was rough, desperate, that sound of a last straw collapsing, not a clean break but a twisting, messy thing. “You do this to us, to our family and you think it’s funny?”_

_  
“Nah,” Jesse said, but at this point he couldn’t erase the ironic grin from his face with a beltsander.  “I think you’re funny.”_

_His father blustered, like some 1950s tv dad, a mess of throat clearing and bruised ego.  Because here they were blowing up about a blunt, that wasn’t even his. Like they thought he was so dumb he’d bring the shit he sold home.  It was business, yo, and work and home were separate. He knew that.  And he looked over at Jake, trying to drill into him with his eyes to shut up, shut the hell up.  
_

_“Oh, I see, Mr Funnyman,” his mother said.  “We’re funny. You’re the one ruining your life, ruining everything, taking this nice life your father and I work so hard to give you and what? Taking a big old...poo on it!”_

_The ‘poo’ was the last straw, and Jesse burst into laughter, like this was some Kafka shit, some absurd comedy of irony._

_“Out,” his father said, pulling himself up in a tower of outrage and oxford shirt.  “Get out. Now.”_

_“Whatever, man,” Jesse said. “Was heading out anyway.”_

_“Oh, sure!” his mother threw at his back. “All you druggies are alike. You do your thing and it’s all fun for you. Only everyone around you gets hurt!”_

Everyone around you gets hurt. 

He blinked the memory away, blinked the thought away, as Brock heard his voice, turning. And Brock’s whole face lit up, bright and round, and he dropped the toy car--way too young, way too kiddie for him--sneakers pounding over the grass.  “Jesse!” he said, and he sounded happy to see Jesse, legitimately, seriously, uncomplicatedly happy.  Brock didn’t ask about the beard, where Jesse had been, any of that shit.

And none of that stuff mattered anymore either, not when Brock flung his arms around Jesse’s legs, clinging to him like the only piece of his past he still had. It was more than Jesse had, but it was something he could be, something he could do.  The bad son, the evil seed, Captain Cook, Jesse the meth dealer, Blue Sky cook, partner of the dreaded Heisenberg, buyer of his parents' house, ruiner of bathtubs, killer of Gale, killer of Todd, survivor of the Juarez cartels, survivor of Jack’s crazy fucked up Czech meth factory, all these were who he was, but the weight of all of them seemed to fall away, shift off his shoulders as he bent down to hug Brock, like he was somehow, for the first time, finding himself.


End file.
